A day in the life of a freelance mother

Lucy Denyer - 1 Sep 14

There’s this perception, as a parent or would-be parent dreaming about the ideal working scenario, that doing it from home is the way forward. You can roll out of bed and to your desk in your pyjamas, be there for mealtimes, school pick-ups and bathtimes and work around your children, ensuring that they don’t feel abandoned by a mummy who sticks on her heels and hotfoots it to the office the moment the maternity pay runs out.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it isn’t the way forward. Of course working from home has its benefits, as mentioned above, but here’s the reality for a freelance journalist like me:

7am: you’re woken up by your three-year-old demanding breakfast, and realize you completely slept through the alarm you set for 6.30am in a vain attempt to be up, dressed and gone through your email inbox by the time your children rose from their slumbers.

7.30am: you’re feeding the baby with one hand and checking your phone with the other, inwardly praying for a commission but also aware that you have about a million other things to deal with today and if you do get one you’re not exactly sure how you’ll be able to get it done. At that point, three-year-old spills milk all over the table, swamping your phone and sending it into a frenzy of blinking. You realise, with a sinking heart, that there is no IT department to deal with the fall-out and you will have to either spend many hours googling “how to dry out a milky iphone” or get your arse down to the phone shop, pronto.

9am: you’ve finally packed the children off to their childcare for a few hours, and hit your desk, still in your pjs, with milk all down your front. The breakfast table is still covered in crusty plates, bowls and cups, there’s a pile of laundry the size of Everest in your bedroom and the bath has a ring of scum around it, but you don’t have time to deal with any of that now.

9.15am: Check emails. No commission. Ring round everyone you know asking for ideas and trying to set up meetings on the next days you have childcare. Almost impossible as you only have childcare for three days a week, as you can’t afford it for any more, as you don’t know whether you’re going to get enough work to justify shelling out the cash.

12noon: Realise your entire morning has been taken up by trying to find ideas, emailing editors asking them to please, please get back to you and googling “how to dry out a milky iphone”. Phone still isn’t working, so you resort to landline, which will cost a fortune as you’re almost solely calling mobiles. Internet then crashes just as an email comes through asking you to write a piece, and your children arrive back from their childcare. You’re still not dressed.

1pm: having skipped lunch in order to cram some food down your children (you skipped breakfast for the same reason), you return to your desk with a heel of bread and a lump of cheese, having put one down for a nap, and the three-year-old onto the sofa to watch telly for a couple of hours. The kitchen table is now even higher with crusty plates, bowls and cups but you don’t have time to deal with that now. You have a commission – hurrah! Unfortunately, your desk is in the sitting room (there’s no space in your flat for an office) and so your attempt to make a professional call is somewhat undermined by Thomas the Tank Engine burbling away in the background. You retreat to the kitchen (the only other room with a table), but there’s no space because of the dirty crockery. You attempt to balance your laptop on a pillow on your bed, but the broadband doesn’t stretch that far, and your email keeps cutting out. Just as you successfully connect it, and manage to get through to the person you need to speak to, the baby wakes up from his nap.

3pm: you leave the baby with a neighbour for an hour to take the three-year-old to his doctor’s appointment, having told your editor that you can’t speak this afternoon as you have a “meeting”. You hope that, as has been the case at the last several appointments, the doctor is running so late that you have a good half an hour in which the toddler will be entertained by the toys in the waiting room to check your emails and make a couple of phone calls (you’re going to have to pretend not to see the signs asking you to switch your phone off in the surgery). The doctor is running ahead of time. And your phone has no reception. Or 3g.

3.30pm: returning home on your bike with the three-year-old on the back, your phone rings. It’s your editor. You stop the bike and wheel it onto the pavement in order to take the call, and try and lean the bike up against a nearby wall, as it’s a bit tricky to push a bike with a three-year-old on it and talk on a phone. The bike falls over. Fortunately your three-year-old is unscathed as he is strapped into his seat with a helmet on, but he’s a bit shaken up. You continue the telephone call, pretending to your editor that the crashing and cries are just passing traffic, attempting to subdue your child as much as possible and trying to ignore the horrified glances of passers-by.

4pm: you manage to make two successful phone calls by dint of shutting the children into the sitting room with the television on, all the toys out and a bag of Smarties between them (even though the baby doesn’t eat chocolate), while you clear a space for your laptop on the crusty kitchen table. You hopefully now have enough material to write your article (once you’ve also performed a Wikipedia search later on in the evening).

5-7pm: suppertime, bathtime, storytime, bedtime, winetime. We all know how this goes.

7.30pm: you survey the crusty kitchen, at which point your husband arrives home and demands to know when supper will be. After flouncing out in tears you eventually return, lured back by a second glass of wine. You spend the next hour and a half cleaning the kitchen and cooking and eating supper, having realized you’re famished because you haven’t eaten anything all day apart from discarded Smarties. This is your first enjoyable, adult interaction of the day.

9pm: you start the Wikipedia search, in between doing an online grocery order, replying to the various texts you’ve received during the day and going through your emails.

10pm: you’re just getting into the flow of the article when your three-year-old starts crying out with a nightmare. You attempt to soothe his sweaty brow, whisper sweet words, offer water, the loo and everything else you can think of before realizing he’s basically still asleep and returning to your desk, by which time an hour has passed.

11pm: half drunk, knackered and by now semi-illiterate, you finish writing your piece, hoping that it will still seem as good at your final read-through early tomorrow morning. You roll into bed, and set the alarm for 6.30am…

No kidding, that’s what a recent day actually looked like. I long for the time when I could put my smart clothes on, get on the tube, read the paper uninterrupted, get to work, drink a coffee whenever I liked and enjoy adult conversation, in a clean, well-lit work environment where tech support was readily available when anything went wrong. But not! I’m a freelancer! Happy days, right?

Lucy Denyer

Lucy Denyer has been a journalist for 10 whole years, during which time she's written for The Sunday Times, The Times, Red, Stylist, Easy Living, She, The London Magazine and The Lady, amongst others. She is mother to Atticus, 3, and Oswald, 10 months, and lives in London.

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